In 1867 the Doctor’s laborious career came to an end happily in comfort and at peace with all. His biographers assure the reader that Dr. Campbell’s works will last till the final conflagration of the world. Alas! no one reads them now. To come to later times, of course my most vivid recollections are those connected with the late Mr. Spurgeon. In that region of the metropolis known as “over the water” the Baptists flourish as they do nowhere else, and some of their chapels have an interesting history. Amongst many of them rather what is called high doctrine is tolerated—not to say admired. They are the elect of God, preordained before the world was formed to enjoy an existence of beatific rapture, that shall continue when the world has passed away. Of one of the most popular preachers in that locality, the late Jemmy Wells, it is said that when told that one of his hearers had fallen out of a cart and broken his leg his reply was, “Oh, what a blessed thing it is he can’t fall out of the Covenant.” When one of the chapels in that locality was at low-water mark, there came to it the Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon—then little more than a boy, but already famous in East Anglia as a boy preacher—and never had a preacher a more successful career. There was no place in London that was large enough to contain the audiences that flocked to hear him. I first heard him at the Surrey Music Hall, and it was wonderful to see what hordes came there of saints and sinners, lords and ladies, City magnates and county squires, Anonymas from St. John’s Wood, Lady Clara Vere de Veres from Belgravia. It was the fashion to go there on a Sunday morning, just as it was the fashion a generation previously to rush to Hatton Garden to hear Edward Irving. The hall was handsome and light and airy, free from the somewhat oppressive air of Cave Adullam and Little Bethel, and there upon the platform which did duty for a pulpit stood a young man short of stature, broadly built, of a genial though not handsome countenance, with a big head and a voice it was a treat to listen to and audible in every part of that enormous building. What was the secret of his success? He was bold, he was original, he was humorous, and he was in earnest. He said things to make his hearers laugh, and what he said or did was magnified by rumour. Old stories of Billy Dawson and Rowland Hill were placed to Mr. Spurgeon’s credit. The caricaturists made him their butt. There was no picture more commonly displayed at that time than one entitled “Brimstone and Treacle”—the former representing Mr. Spurgeon, the latter Mr. Bellew, then a star of the first order in many an Episcopalian pulpit. Bellew soon ran through his ephemeral popularity—that of Mr. Spurgeon grew and strengthened day by day. Do you, like the late Sir James Graham, want to know the reason why? The answer is soon given. “I am going into the ministry,” said a youthful student to an old divine.